The Society of Saint Gregory the Great 

What is worship like at the Society of St. Gregory?

Although the summit of our worship as Catholics is the Eucharist, we begin our Sundays with the other great prayer of the Church, the Divine Office in the form of Morning Prayer from the Book of Divine Worship.  In this simple service we recite psalms, hear lessons from Scripture using the RSV-CE Bible and pray the great hymns of the Church, the Te Deum and the Benedictus.

Our Sunday morning Mass will be familiar to those who grew up in the Episcopal Church as well as those who went to Mass in the Catholic Church before the liturgical reforms of the 1960's.  Following the ancient traditions of the Church we sing and chant as much of the service as possible and use incense many Sundays.  We sings hymns found in the Episcopal Hymnal 1940 without an organ, instead relying of the instruments God gave us, our voices!  During the prayers of the Mass you will notice that the priest does not face you, instead, the whole congregation with the priest faces the same way towards the East.  This is the ancient prayer posture of the Church, priest and congregant facing God together in prayer.  Following the traditions of our Anglican forefathers, we conduct our services in the language of our people, English, but we make sure to use dignified English. The sacral English we use, Elizabethan English as it is often called, reminds us that we have stepped outside of the hustle and bustle of the world to join the Angels and Archangels in praise of God.   Our Scripture readings are from the modern Roman Catholic Lectionary, but are read from the Revised Standard Version Bible, 2^nd Catholic Edition, a descendant of the great Anglican King James Bible.

Following mass we enjoy fellowship and coffee in our parish dining room.  Various treats that are good for the soul, but perhaps bad for the waistline, can often be had with the coffee!

Please send any questions you have about our worship to info@stgregorymobile.org, or better yet, come join us this Sunday and experience our worship of God Almighty!

Who is the Society of St. Gregory for?

While our worship services are open to all, our mission is to help Anglicans and other liturgical Protestants come into full communion with the Catholic Church in a worship environment that maintains the best of the preaching style, hymnody and traditional English of the Anglican Patrimony that is consistent with the Catholic faith.  We also serve those members of the Catholic Church who are former Anglicans or are married to former Anglicans.

Who is Saint Gregory the Great?

Saint Gregory the Great was Pope from 509 to 604 A.D.  He was the first Pope to instruct the Church to maintain the Anglican customs found in England.  Saint Augustine, the first Archbishop of Canterbury, wrote to Saint Gregory asking him if he should make the Church in England conform to all the practices found in the Church of Rome.  The Venerable Bede, in his work Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, preseveres Saint Gregory's answer:

"You know, my brother, the custom of the Roman Church in which you remember that you were bred up. But my will is, that if you have found anything, either in the Roman, or the Gallican, or any other Church, which may be more acceptable to Almighty God, you should carefully make choice of the same, and sedulously teach the Church of the English, which as yet is new in the faith, whatsoever you can gather from the several Churches. For things are not to be loved for the sake of places, but places for the sake of good things. Choose, therefore, from every Church those things that are pious, religious, and right, and when you have, as it were, made them up into one bundle, let the minds of the English be accustomed thereto. " (Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, Chapter 27)

Saint Gregory the Great, pray for us.

Our liturgy, sourced from our Anglican worship heritage, is contained in The Book of Divine Worship

A Prayer for Anglican Patrimony

O Holy Ghost the Lord, who on Pentecost gavest the Church the gift of tongues that Christ might be known, loved and served by peoples of divers nations and customs: watch over the Anglican heritage within thy Church, we pray thee, that, led by thy guidance and strengthened by thy grace, that it may find such favor in thy sight that its people may increase both in holiness and number, and so show forth thy glory; who livest and reignest with the Father and Son, one God, world without end.   Amen.

From Our Lady of Walsingham, Houston, TX.